The deal marks an anticlimax to Société Générale's high hopes of 1998, when Keith Percy, Nicola Horlick and John Richards pledged that they would take on the giants of the UK asset management industry.

SGAM currently manages $8.2bn (€5.8bn), against the group’s €282bn, making it a respectable little operation, but not one that ranks highly in the thinking of investment consultants. A price for the transaction has not been disclosed which indicates it is not material in size.

But only in a monetary sense. For GLG the acquisition brings a golden opportunity, in the wake of recent defections and outflows. It allows the company to broaden its offering into the long-only space and diversify its exposure to the collapsing architecture of the hedge fund industry. The deal will take the group's assets under management to about $25bn, and raise the proportion of long-only funds from 15% to about 40%.

Crucially, from GLG’s perspective, Jean-Pierre Mustier, the former investment banker who replaced Alain Clot at the helm of SGAM in September says he looks forward to "developing a strong business relationship between GLG and Société Générale." The hedgies will enjoy their access to the French bank's mighty distribution network, assuming the products measure up.

A lot of prospective deals have failed to fly so far: Friends Provident, the UK insurer, hung a for-sale sign over its asset management division, F&C, in January but has failed to find a buyer, and according to several sources, Italian banking group Unicredit started touting its Pioneer Investments arm around the place earlier this year.

Bankers who looked at the business took the view that too much of it took the form of in-house fund management, implying a battle over prospective fee levels. Those who looked at Santander’s fund business took a similar view. Pioneer is understood not to be formally on the market following the credit crunch and Santander remains unsold.

For all his perceived faults, Stan O’Neal did rather well to shift half his Merrill Lynch Investment Management business to BlackRock, around the time when credit issues were starting to surface. It is unlikely that Merrill’s buyer Bank of America will want to hang onto the business, but it is savvy enough to know that this is not a great moment to start bargaining on price with BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink.

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The one large asset management transaction that looks near completion—a potential sale of part of Credit Suisse Asset Management to Aberdeen Asset Management—probably owes as much to Martin Gilbert's skills as a born dealmaker as it does to the Swiss' desire to sell out. Cross-marketing opportunities are again the factor which would help a deal to stack up.

Kevin Pakenham, a managing director at Jefferies Putnam Lovell, said the collapse of equity markets made it "an odd time" for owners to want to sell asset management businesses unless they had a pressing need to do so.

He said: "We are at an all-time low in terms of valuation for these businesses. You can say that if a bank's situation is so bad—and lots of banks are in very bad situations—then the issue is about whether an asset management sell-off is likely to raise enough capital to deal with that."

Because of these considerations, the fact that Mustier has evidently decided a relationship with GLG is worth pursuing is doubly interesting. But it is only too telling of the fund management industry's changed circumstances that a business launched with great fanfare a decade ago should have been reduced to a bargaining chip in a sector that is struggling to sell any products whatsoever.